Clinicians at the Children's Hospital of Orange County, California have adapted a mobile platform that enables them to send notices to parents of new-borns in neonatal intensive care unit as well as chat and text with them. The hospital is a Stage 7 HIMSS EMR Adoption Model honouree this year.
Since these parents can't spend every minute of the day in the hospital, this mobile platform can help clinicians to communicate with the parents. The pingmd platform was adopted by the CHOC a year ago.
The patient engagement tool is the most recent addition to pingmd's platform, a New York based company marketing a cloud-based communication platform that allows clinicians to talk instantly with clinicians, care team members and patients. The goal of the company is to sit above the disparate platforms of the healthcare setting, including health information exchanges and EHRs and also to connect data sources that are used by clinicians most often.
This upgraded platform - pingmd2 - enables doctors to tailor and build specific patient interface programs so that they can engage in real-time conversation with other care providers. The platform also allows them to build team referral networks and create referral directors and integration with an EHR platform.
The functions of the platform are used through an efficient and structured dialogue via a secure app. Clinicians can share photographs, text, images and allow patients to submit information to their doctors. This app has the ability to make real-time coordination a reality as this element can speed up the care delivery process, reduce delays and waste and improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes.
William Feaster. MD, the Los Angeles area hospital's chief medical information officer says that the mobile platform was adapted to deal with the texting problem where doctors and nurses use non-HIPAA-compliant communications solutions to talk to each other. He points out that he could have ordered hospital employees to stop texting but this new app was a much more secure means of communicating with each other in real time.
"It's an essential tool to communicating about care," he said. "This is about so much more than just sending a text."
According to Gopal Chopra, CEO of pingmd, the platform’s integration with EHRs is critical since health systems are always looking for ways to improve access to medical records as well as give clinicians decision support tools at the point of care. He says that in future this will further develop and that the company has some great ideas to provide advanced communication tools for healthcare.
Source: mHealth News
Image Credit: pingmd.com
